Lightning Bug is related to all of Harington's other Stay More novels, but Some Other Place. The Right Place, with its theme "of loss and search, of losing and finding, of wanting" most clearly relates to Lightning Bug.

In Some Other Place a young woman, Diana Stoving, searches for the life lived by her grandfather, Daniel Lyman Montross. Her search is conducted through a young man, Day Whittacker, who, under hypnosis and through age-regression, relives Montross's life. This early 1970s exploration of a life lived from 1880 to 1953 produces a strong sense of double time, of then and now, similar to that in Lightning Bug. Also, as in the earlier novel, Some Other Place imitates a musical structure with its units being designated movements. Theodore Roethke's poetry, important to Lightning Bug, becomes central to the structure of the novel's third movement, "There and Here," which consists entirely...